Joseph and the Famine

47: 13-26

The famine was
relentless. No food grew in Egypt or Canaan. The citizens paid for the grain
that had been stored, but finally their money ran out. Joseph told them that if
they would bring their livestock instead of money, he would exchange their
livestock for grain. They followed that plan until Pharaoh owned all the
livestock. To help the hungry people, Joseph proposed that they let him buy
their land in exchange for grain. And just like before, Pharaoh ended up owning
all the land in Egypt, and in this way the people of Egypt were reduced to
slavery. Now that Pharaoh owned all of the land (except for the land of the
priests), Joseph distributed seed to be planted as the famine finally subsided.
The plan was that when a crop was reaped, the people would give one fifth of it
as tax to Pharaoh. The other four-fifths they would keep for themselves. The
people did not object and were grateful to Joseph for saving their lives.725

This process is
something for which Joseph has been criticized. People say that he took
advantage of poverty, closed on the mortgages and bought the land, but this is
an unfair criticism of Joseph. To begin with, he was the agent of Pharaoh. None
of this was for himself. He was not dishonest in any sense of the word and did
not personally gain because of the famine. An illustration of this is the
scarcity of, and demand for, uranium during World War II in America. When some
men found that they had uranium on their properties (especially in Arizona),
they were paid a lot of money for their land. Were they taking advantage of
their government? I don’t think so. The law of supply and demand was at work. It
seems to me that this same principle was at work in the land of Egypt. Joseph
bought the land for Pharaoh, and he enabled the people to live by providing
grain to them. He couldn’t just give the grain away. If he did that, the whole
world would have been at his doorstep. The result would have been chaos. It is
reasonable to conclude that Joseph stayed within the law of supply and demand.726

Joseph has also
been criticized for favoring his own family by providing them grain while
everyone else had to pay for it. But it should be pointed out that the
Israelites were guests of Pharaoh, and as such, were on completely different
footing than the rest of the Egyptians. Besides, there was no possibility of
their purchasing food because they had left their possessions behind them. They
had been told by Pharaoh not to be anxious about what they possessed in Canaan,
and he promised that all the good of Egypt should be theirs. Pharaoh’s care of
them was a matter of philanthropy, while a free gift of corn to the people would
probably have resulted in chaos and anarchy.727